Smooth Sailing for Blu-ray?

Starting with Warner Bros.’s dramatic defection to Blu-ray on the eve of this year’s CES, it's been a tumultuous couple of months for HD DVD, ending at last on Monday with Toshiba's announcement that it would cease developing, manufacturing, and marketing HD DVD players and media. And frankly, we have to give Toshiba props for accepting its defeat so readily and putting an end to a format war that had already lasted too long.

The question now is what the future holds for Blu-ray. Will its triumph over HD DVD prompt consumers to finally buy high-def disc players and movies en masse? Not according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recently made the claim that optical discs are an obsolete content distribution method. And indeed, while the two optical formats have been duking it out, the Hollywood studios have been forging online-distribution partnerships. The most high-profile of these involves the updated Apple TV, which now lets you stream both standard- and high-def material that you buy or rent from iTunes directly to your TV. A set-top box by Vudu (www.vudu.com) offers similar functionality, as does the Xbox 360 via Microsoft’s Live Marketplace (in fact, movie director Michael Bay made waves a while back by accusing Microsoft of supporting HD DVD just to fuel format confusion and drive frustrated consumers to its online store).

It all sounds very juicy, but communications analyst Michael Inouye of market research firm In-Stat isn’t convinced of the online threat: “Until we get much larger data pipes for downloading, HD will be a pipe dream. I would imagine that quite a few consumers will not accept video ‘hiccups’ should they occur as they download the video (in cases where they stream the content). And if the consumer wishes to upgrade to larger data-transfer rates, it will likely come at a price.”

In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold offers up another factor: “Cable TV operators and the TelcoTV services provide you with your subscription TV service and your broadband Internet service, so they will continue to make sure their pay-TV services provide the highest convenience, the best image quality, and the most recent new titles so that they won’t lose too much of their user base to the Internet-delivered services.” That should come as little consolation to the Blu-ray camp, however.

We’ll render our own hands-on assessment of the major movie streaming/downloading services in the May issue of Maximum PC, so stay tuned.

Comments

Both of these technologies were bs to begin with. Woop-dee-doo we got a few more pixels. It's not much of an improvement, they just took the same technology and tweaked it a bit.

How about we get some real inovation. Black and white -> colour -> 3 dimensions. I dont know if anyone's noticed this but the world isn't flat. Maybe when they figure out how to incorporate the z-axis into movies I'll drop some money down. Sony and Toshiba can both suck a duck for their laziness.

They make pretty good upscaling players for regular DVDs and it'll play HD-DVDs which will be going for peanuts in a few months. Buy the HD-DVDs, rip them to your hard drive, and re-record them when cheap Blu-Ray recorders come out.

OTOH, Sony and Panasonic can go pound sand if they think I'm going to pay $400 for a Blu-Ray player. Wide screen DVD quality is sufficient for me, anyway. Since they're the victors, I'll just wait and let the dust settle on their expensive boxes. A Blu-Ray player will be on my shopping list when it hits $99, and Blu-Ray DVDs are no more expensive than regular DVDs...

I for one will never buy a digital download of a movie that I want to see. Music is one thing, but movies are a different critter all-together.

For one, think of just the hard drive storage space that would be require to store your purchased library of HD encoded movies. I have nearly 300 movies on DVD (which are encoded at 480p resolution), even at just 4GB per movie, that's 1.2TB of drive space required. For music, compression is not a big deal, but for me, the only way I would EVER consider a digital movie download is if it were in full 1080p, anything less might as well just be standard DVD content... i.e. not worth purchasing.
Download speeds are also problematic even at 15Mbps, you're talking hours to download a single 1080p uncompressed movie.

Good points. But not everyone collects 300 movies or wants to wait 2 days for delivery. I agree with you about compression, but many people are satisfied with compressed HD. Those are the ones who will get catered to. Storage is also rapidly decreasing in cost, with laptops even preparing to introduce 500GB drives. It is already pennies per GB, and as demand increases, huge drives will be quite affordable and take a lot less space than shelves of jewel boxes. That alone appeals to many, although not me. I enjoy the simplicity of putting the disk in and pressing play.

Being virtually ,if not just plain not, expandable, its like sitting down at a dumb terminal. They should make that the OLPC candidate. Wouldnt cost much to ship!

And digital DL's are increasing, but wont replace the disk anytime soon. I love owning my own "hard copy" of anything. And if people in rural areas have to drive 45 mins to get movies but do have internet...Amazon and the USPS deliver.

Despite what Steve Jobs says when hes trying to sell his overpriced Macbook air, the optical disc is not dead and will not be for several years. As much as i enjoy Steam, and the occasional movie rental from Xbox live there is something to be said for actual owning a physical copy of the software, movie, or game and for the most part being able to use it how you want. First off, all digital distribution of video content that i have ever seen has been for "rental" or has so much DRM its not worth paying.

You either have a time limit (24 hours after pressing play) to view it, or you cant transfer it to another computer or portable device without a lot of hassle. So if you watch a movie at a friends house you have to bring your system with you. And until we see a massive increase in connection speed its still faster to install a program from a disc than to wait for it to download. And that doesn't account for bandwidth caps that ISP's like comcast have in place. With no optical disks depending on how much you like movies or games, your going to hit that 200GB cap pretty quickly. And you have to consider connection reliability as well. With no net connection you'll will not be able to get that movie or game. Aside from the Best buy burning to the ground or really wanting software at 4AM i cant think of a time when i have been unable to get a physical copy of a movie or game.

While I agree that Digidistro is years away, your last statement doesn't take into account the many areas of America where residents do not have a Wal-mart, Best Buy, or Cosco. I know people who must drive 45 minutes to be able to shop at a major retailer, just to find a more limited selection than what is maintained in larger metropolitan areas. Yet these people have reliable (subjective) high speed internet service. A ten meinute buffer wait makes more sense than 3 gallons of gas and a 2 hour expedition for a movie. And Pc's won't be the main recipient of streaming media in the future. Netflix is already planning PS3 and XBox 360 support. Media extenders will fill that role. Tiered service levels from ISP's will emerge, wether we want it or not. Just like everything else we buy, we will have to pay more to get more. That doesn't necessarily mean higher bandwidth will be cost prohibitive. If media moves towards this model, ISP's are not going to cut their own throats by saying, "you have used enough this month". They will have to arrive at a pricing structure that appeals to the consumer or they would go out of business. Compare broadband costs now to 3 years ago. Supply and demand.

I have an xbox360 with hddvd and have been ripping them to hdd. Now that HDDVD is dead, prices are dropping and it's a good time to stock up on HDDVD movies - blue ray is $30/movie, while at amazon most titles are now $15.

I have heard from a few sources that the PS3 color calibration is off on the Blu-Ray player. Movies look a little saturated, maybe it's calibrated that way for gaming? Also, unless you use the HDMI output the audio track will be compressed but this is not just limited to the PS3. Just something to consider if you have to choose.

Now that the format war is over, I will finally get a player, I was holding out to see which would be the winner. I dont think that streaming will replace the optical disk in the near future, maybe someday down the road, but then we will have other formats. I dont think that streaming will catch on until you can watch an HD movie, with a stutter, I dont want to have to wait for my movie to buffer up so I can watch it. The other problem is I dont have a media pc in the bedroom, sometimes its nice to just lay in bed and watch a movie, I dont want to have to build a pc just so that I can watch a movie in the bedroom,